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Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

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Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#361

Post by hawleyal »

grok2 wrote: post #341
rntz wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a misrepresentation of the article's position. The article's actual, more ambiguous, position is better summarized in another paragraph: > People tend to discuss Silicon Valley’s diversity problem in binary terms. One camp says companies are biased against underrepresented minorities, or at least aren’t trying hard enough to attract them. The other says there aren’t enough people from these backgrounds who ar…

This sort of assumes that it is everyone's job to try hard to attract underrepresented minorities. That's expecting way too much noble-mindedness of people. What employment tends to optimize for is good capable employees in general. If the pool does include qualified and capable minorities, they will get employed in most cases (and racial bias will likely be there only in a minority of cases -- atleast in Silicon Val…

I think you are exaggerating how much merit is taken into account during interviews.

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#362

Post by hosh »

numbsafari wrote: post #114
ryanlol wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not what she says, her problem isn't that she doesn't like Marvel Cinematic Universe but that she feels that she doesn't have much in common with people of other races.

I think that's stretching it. What she said is she doesn't feel like she has much in common with these particular people , not people of other races in general. Most "engineering-types" would probably feel the exact same way if they were asked to join the sales team at their company. Talk about culture shock...

Maybe the point then is that if we are aiming for diversity, then we aim for diversity: come out of your own comfort zone and get to know something or someone that feels uncomfortably foreign, try to appreciate this for what it is. It applies as much for "engineering-types" getting to know "sales-types" as it is for people of different racial heritages.

Why should we expect "diversity" to have an appended, "as long as I'm comfortable with that"? Why do we struggle so much with what's "normative"? Why not treat this as an adventure, something unexpected and unknown to explore?

Another aspect of this is that, I think people want to feel like they are part of the team, working together towards a common goal. If what bonds the team are the things they like or dislike, that's a pretty weak team. Shouldn't the common goal that binds the team together be the product or features the are working on? Isn't that the point of company culture -- not to homogenize everyone, but to gel the team? (See: http://the-programmers-stone.com/ )

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#363

Post by selimthegrim »

joeletizia wrote: post #200
zanek wrote: post #133

As a human that people in America would call black/African-American I really dislike articles like this. I understand that some black people feel like they cant relate to others, but I find the entire premise of such arguments about homogeneous workplaces and cultures completely ridiculous. The culture of 'black' people in Alabama will be very different from Howard or Washington DC, does that mean Alabama is unwelcom…

I could not agree with your comments more. The more we realize that there are cultural divides other than skin color, I think we as a collective species can see that the constructs that have been used to divide us in the past are completely pointless; everyone is very different. Most people would call me white. But I'm from the north eastern US, I'm catholic, I come from an italian background, and I speak shitty brok…

You probably both speak shitty broken Spanish because she's used to talking to the help.

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#364

Post by noir_lord »

dopamean wrote: post #338
School-Cotton wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

African-Americans are a distinct ethnocultural group with their own cultural references, dialect, religious traditions, and so on (of course this doesn't apply to all black people; I'm talking about averages here.) "Black" in France is just a phenotype. Progressive-leaning people in the US would typically be uncomfortable with the idea of "assimilating" Blacks because it implies that White Anglo-Saxon culture is (or…

As a black man who went to almost entirely white schools my whole life and grew up in a very white place in New York I can sort of confirm what you're saying. When I went to college and met other black students who grew up around more black people I found that I had very little in common with them and it was hard to communicate. I was then, and always have been, more comfortable around white people. On a side note, I…

> and it was hard to communicate.

I'm curious what the differences where in communication, here in the UK the black people I've worked with have been no harder to communicate with than anyone else, I have noticed there is slightly more of a communication gap with black people who come from London (but I've only known two and they where both deeply religious which I think had more to do with it).

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#365

Post by [deleted] »

ebfe wrote: post #213
alistproducer2 wrote: post #187

I'm a black guy working in IT at a company in the top 5 of the Fortune 500. This is complicated issue. There have been experiment that show having a "black" name lowers your job prospects [1]. Other studies that show: "...race actually turned out to be more significant than a criminal background. Notice that employers were more likely to call Whites with a criminal record (17% were offered an interview) than Blacks w…

The first study confounds the issues of race and class. Emily is not the white equivalent to Lakisha, Brandi is.

[deleted]

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#366

Post by noir_lord »

crpatino wrote: post #353
rezistik wrote: post #328

The issue I take with this is that American assimilation is a two way street. Every culture puts in and takes out. Tacos, sausages, pizza, sushi, these are American foods as much as they are Mexican, German, Japanese, or Italian. Some of them more American than their source in ways. It's not about forcing White Angle-Saxon culture. It's about forging American culture and identity.

So, because you eat tacos, you understand me? Let's try, please let me know when you know at least half of this kind of tacos (the animal is beef unless otherwise specified) of your list. Maybe we can have an interesting conversation then: 1. Sesos (boiled brains). 2. Lengua (boiled tongue). 3. Tripas (deep fried pork intestine). 4. Moronga(fried pork blood). 5. Ojo (boiled eyeballs). 6. Higado (fried liver). 7. Tuet…

I'm in the UK, I've eaten most of those but not in taco's

2) I quite like a tongue sandwich. 3) Tripe is not my cup of tea but I've had it 4) Fried pork blood, we have a thing here called black pudding (it's congealed blood soaked in oats, then fried, it's damn good and apparenly good for you). 6) Lots of times, don't see it much now, my nan lived on it 7) Used in stocks 10) Pork Scratchings are huge here also damn good but really bad for you.

Traditional English cuisine ate everything.

Chitlings are pretty grim though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pudding :)

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#367

Post by kenjackson »

carbocation wrote: post #62

Looking at the commentary at Hacker News, I would say that the author has done a disservice to the topic by ignoring the minority status of East Asians, South Asians, and Latinos. With very minor changes, they could have used the correct words to cover the topic they really wanted to cover: that there are fewer black programmers in SV than is desired/expected/needed. And that is a topic that deserves discussion. But…

In fairness to the author, the title is "black coders". Not "minority coders".

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#368

Post by dcole2929 »

ryanlol wrote: post #61
pingou wrote: post #18

"as the only African American on her team, she didn’t feel she had much in common with her colleagues. “When I went out to lunch or something with my team, it was sort of like, ‘Soooo, what are you guys talking about?’ ” she says" I find this sentence really shocking, perhaps because I'm french and in France we try to assimilate people more (I don't really know), but I would definitely think that as a white software…

Would it be shocking if the roles were reversed? There's just as many racist black people as there are racist white people. edit: Am I wrong?

In short yes. A) There are more white people in America in general (see really any/every census)

B) There are fare more white people in positions of power. So it matters more when a white person is racist than when a person of color is. Racism sucks but the real kicker is discrimination

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#369

Post by devalier »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #238
devalier wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The imgur photo came from the Bell Curve by Charles Murray. There was some controversy about parts of the book, but the fact that blacks score one standard deviation lower on IQ tests was never disputed. You can also find this by just googling "race and SAT scores" "race and LSAT scores". Look at the official results put out by those organizations, and you will find that on every single test the average black score i…

The very idea that you can abstract IQ from socio-economic status has no basis in science. The idea that IQ is a measure of intrinsic intelligence is also not accepted. There's a reason race is not accepted as a biological handicap anywhere but in white supremacy circles and it's not political correctness.

All human fields of study are very messy, they are not precise sciences in the way that Newton's laws are.

IQ tests are designed to be excellent proxies for what we generally understand to be intelligence. They can be better or worse proxies depending on the circumstance. In the particular case of testing black Americans, the IQ tests are quite predictive, and the world looks like what we would expect, if the tests were indeed actually testing intelligence. What is your evidence that IQ tests are poor proxies in the case of testing African-Americans?

A great deal of data seems to show that IQ still is very predictive, even when accounting for socio-economic status. That is exactly what they were originally designed for. SAT tests for instance were designed to find students from poorer and more marginalized backgrounds who nonetheless were still very smart and could achieve if given the chance. This is all covered in the Bell Curve, and well some professors thought that Murray exaggerated the degree of certainty, no one showed that his data was false, nor that the conclusion was false.

Believe it or not, I used to be much more in your camp, but after reading a bunch of sources, including the Bell Curve, Gould's the Mismeasure of Man, dozens of papers from scientists contesting the Bell Curve, responses to those papers, and so on, I came to the conclusions I did. Personally, I would much prefer if the evidence had said otherwise. I don't like being called a racist asshat. But given the evidence is what it is, I don't think it is fair to accuse Silicon Valley of judging people by race over merit, simply based on hiring statistics.

race is not accepted as a biological handicap

That's not an accurate phrasing of my view. If a black person has a 130IQ, they have a 130IQ and their race is not a handicap. No person should view their race as a handicap, or be personally stereotyped based on their race. It is just statistically less likely that a black person has a 130IQ. And that was what the original charge was based on -- the statistical underrepresentation of black people in Silicon Valley.

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#370

Post by School-Cotton »

noir_lord wrote: post #364
dopamean wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a black man who went to almost entirely white schools my whole life and grew up in a very white place in New York I can sort of confirm what you're saying. When I went to college and met other black students who grew up around more black people I found that I had very little in common with them and it was hard to communicate. I was then, and always have been, more comfortable around white people. On a side note, I…

> and it was hard to communicate. I'm curious what the differences where in communication, here in the UK the black people I've worked with have been no harder to communicate with than anyone else, I have noticed there is slightly more of a communication gap with black people who come from London (but I've only known two and they where both deeply religious which I think had more to do with it).

Black Americans have had their own culture developing separately from Anglo-Saxon Americans for hundreds of years. I'm not sure why you think immigrants to Britain that don't share any common group characteristic other than "has dark skin and an African phenotype" are comparable.
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